In recent years, there has been an enormous increase in the amount of digital media available online. Services, such as Apple's iTunes® for example, enable users to legally purchase and download music. Other services, such as Yahoo!® Music Unlimited and RealNetwork's Rhapsody® for example, provide access to millions of songs for a monthly subscription fee. YouTube® provides users access to video media. As a result, media items have become much more accessible to consumers worldwide. However, the increased accessibility of media has only heightened a long-standing problem for the media industry, which is namely the issue of linking users with media that matches their preferences.
Many companies, technologies, and approaches have emerged to address this issue of media recommendation. Media item recommendations may be provided to users as suggestions based on information about the user and/or their media likes or dislikes, also called preferences. In this manner, the user is more likely to respond, such as by purchase, to media item recommendations. Media item recommendations may be provided either by service provider companies, or “socially” by the user's online “friends” (typically identified by user id).
In the case of socially or friend recommended media items, the user typically receives the recommended media items through a client application executing on the user's personal computer or other networked device. The networked device communicates with other networked devices to receive the friend recommendations. When the friend recommendations are received, the user can display the recommendations on a graphical user interface (GUI). The friend recommendations are typically presented to the user in the form of a media item table having a plurality of columns, wherein title or other identifying information about the user's media items is graphically presented. The media item table may contain all of the user's media collection, including recommended items and non-recommended media items. Recommended media items may be signified by the user id or name of “friend” or user that recommended the media item to the user.
It may also be desirable to provide company recommended media items to a user in addition to friend recommendations. Company media item recommendations are typically programmatically provided, meaning they are provided based on a programmed methodology, algorithm, or other scheme. For example, company provided media item recommendations may be provided based on a holistic classification of assigning ratings to attributes of the user's media collection. Alternatively, company media item recommendations may be based on a communal approach, wherein recommendations are based on the collective wisdom of a group of users with similar tastes by profiling the habits of a particular user and then searching similar profiles of other users. In either case, company or programmatically-generated media item recommendations allow the user to be presented with additional recommendations for a greater variety of media options relevant to the user. Companies also benefit in that they may obtain additional opportunities for revenues generated if the user desires to purchase a company recommended media item.
The user's client application typically intermingles friend and programmatically-generated media item recommendations into the user's media collection. The user may desire to separately distinguish friend media item recommendations from programmatically-generated media item recommendations for ease in browsing and/or selection. However, if friend media item recommendations are isolated, the user may lose the benefit of being presented and browsing highly related programmatically-generated media item recommendations.
A tradeoff may exist. Either the user is presented all media item recommendations, both friend and programmatically-generated, for browsing and/or selection. Or, the user chooses to only browse one set of media item recommendations thereby losing visual access to the other. The present invention addresses this tradeoff by allowing the user to select a media item from among a list of friend media item recommendations while at the same time automatically and associatively being presented a separate list of related, programmatically-generated media item recommendations to the selected media item. In this manner, the user can browse and select friend media item recommendations while at the same time being presented with automatically updated, programmatically-generated related media item recommendations.